This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
I’ve been having a recurring nightmare lately.
It begins sometime in the 2050s. My grandchildren are in college taking a survey course on contemporary American history. In the textbook, they read that a critical turning point for the United States was the 2020 presidential election, which Joseph R. Biden, Jr. successfully stole from Donald J. Trump. This injustice was corrected only in 2024 when the country returned Mr. Trump to office and began to undo some of the terrible damage that had been done, not just by Mr. Biden, but by a whole series of Democratic and Republican presidents.
The U.S. economy has not been all that strong in the past few decades, but Americans are much more self-reliant than in the past. They have realized they do not need all the products, food, movies and people that had once been allowed to pour into the country. Travel outside the country is considered highly overrated.
Americans had to adjust, in any case, to the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia, which encompasses Japan, Korea and Taiwan (finally returned to its rightful home in the People’s Republic of China). Wise American presidents had recognized that the people of Asia could make their own decisions without American help and thereby avoided World War III.
A similar peace prevails on the western side of the Eurasian continent. Russia had righted the wrong brought about by the breakup of the Soviet Union by reincorporating Ukraine, the three Baltic countries, Georgia, Moldova and eastern Poland into its sphere of influence. Again, the world had been spared a nuclear war when Washington realized it had no business telling Moscow how it should behave toward its neighbors.
The textbook’s descriptions of events in the more distant past are also different from what I was taught. According to the authors, World War II should never have happened. My grandchildren cannot believe that nearly half a million Americans died needlessly when President Franklin D. Roosevelt interfered to keep Germany from finding its rightful place in Europe. Anti-German hysteria in the United States had been whipped up by manufactured stories about concentration camps and mass killings of Jews. According to the textbook, while admittedly some Jews did die in Europe, this conflict should have been considered no different from other ethnic conflicts around the world. The false narrative about the threat posed by Germany misled Americans into believing that they had a mission to save other countries from alleged dictators. This misconception led to one of the biggest misallocations of resources in human history, as the United States poured blood and treasure into a huge imperial establishment with military bases and personnel not just in Europe, but all around the world.
In the 2020s, a whole generation of revisionist scholars known as the New Historians had begun to reinterpret many aspects of U.S. history. They helped Americans understand that President Abraham Lincoln was no hero. He led the country into a bloody and pointless Civil War that killed some 600,000 people and devastated an entire region of the country. This “War of Northern Aggression” was not motivated by hostility to the institution of slavery, which was actually much more benevolent than the radical abolitionists had led people to believe. Rather, the war reflected the imperial ambitions of politicians in Washington, who saw racial grievances as an excuse to expand the power of the federal government. This power grab undermined the American system of democratic self-government the founding fathers had intended, a system in which individual states are free to make their own choices. Some politicians steeped in the New History tradition had even suggested removing Abraham Lincoln from his eponymous memorial, replacing his statue with one of former President Trump. The inscription above the proposed gilded figure needed just one change: “In this temple, as in the hearts of those for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Donald J. Trump is enshrined forever.”
The New Historians were controversial when they first started articulating their narratives. The government in Washington made a mistake by trying to mandate the teaching of their views in classrooms around the country. This provoked complaints of government overreach. But the revisionists found, to their surprise, that they did not need to force people to accept their version of the American past. Many on the other side of the political spectrum had been arguing for years that the United States was an imperial power that for too long had tried to impose its will on the rest of the world. Progressives began to see the New Historians not as enemies, but as potential allies. My grandchildren have a hard time understanding how people could have been so misguided for so long.
The world in the 2050s is peaceful because most Americans have come to accept that there is no such thing as universal values. Each country has the right to follow its own traditions and culture, and if those differ from the preferences of the United States, so be it. If another country wants a strong central government, one that can control media critics or declare a state religion, it has a right to do so. The United States is no different in this regard.
In this dream, I realize how easy it is to control historical narratives in this age of the ubiquitous internet. From the Civil War until the digital age, the historical narrative was controlled by a small group of left-wing elites, who brainwashed Americans into believing their version of events. The internet liberated ordinary people from control by those elites, and now it is easy to get lots of people to listen to whatever narrative you want to promote. You don’t even have to force them; they want to believe what you are telling them, and to help you spread their new gospel.
I begin to wonder if I myself have been deluded for all these years by the narratives I have been fed since childhood. As I fly out of Donald J. Trump International Airport over Washington, D.C., I wonder if I really want to wake up.
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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